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Create RSS Feeds for Twitter

Twitter has dropped support for RSS Feeds but there does exist a solution, slightly complicated though, that you may use to generate feeds for your various Twitter streams including Twitter search results, user timelines and even Twitter lists.

Without RSS feeds, it is difficult to use your Twitter data elsewhere. For instance, you can no longer create recipes in IFTTT that get triggered when you post a new tweet. You cannot import your Twitter timeline automatically into your blog. You cannot track Twitter search results for certain keywords in your RSS reader.

If you are also missing RSS Feeds in Twitter, here’s a new workaround that is much easier to implement (you can get a Twitter RSS feed in two minutes) and more reliable as well.

How to Create RSS Feeds in Twitter

The trick is simple. Twitter offers widgets to help you embed user timelines into your website. The new workaround simply transforms these Twitter widgets into regular RSS Feeds with the help of a simple Google Script. Here’re the instructions:

From your Twitter homepage, go to Settings -> Widgets (link) and create a new widget. You can create widgets for user timelines, favorites, Twitter list and search results.

Once the new widget is published, make a note of the widget ID which you can find in the the URL of the widget.

Click here to make a copy of the Google Script and choose Run -> Twitter_RSS to initialize and authorize the script. You’ve to do this only once.

Go to Publish -> Deploy as Web App and set the version as 1.0. Use Anyone, including Anonymous under Who has access to the app and hit Deploy.

Google Script will now create a unique URL for your web app that will look something likehttps://script.google.com/macros/s/ABCD/exec. Just append the Twitter Widget ID (created in Step 2) to this URL and your RSS feed for Twitter is ready.

For instance, if the Twitter widget ID is 123456, your RSS Feed URL would be: